Warren E. Rollins was raised in California. He was the pupil of Virgil Williams at the San Francisco School of Design, becoming assistant director of the school. In 1887, after further study in the East he moved to San Diego. He began to specialize in Indian subjects, traveling through the Western states. In 1900 he was in Arizona painting Hopi Canyon ruins in northern New Mexico and had a studio near El Tovar at the Grand Canyon.

Rollins was an early member of the Santa Fe art colony, along with Carlos Vierra, Gerald Cassidy, Kenneth Chapman, and Sheldon Parson, arriving in 1915 through his friendship with E.I. Couse. He had previously spent years at Pueblo Bonita, New Mexico. Rollins had the first formal exhibition in Santa Fe, showing Indian paintings before 1910, so that he was properly regarded as the “dean of the Santa Fe art colony.” Rollins had a peried when he favored working in crayon, an oddity matched by other Western painters like Groll and Kihn. In the 1940s, Rollins moved to Baltimore where he drew crayon seascapes.

Resource: SAMUELS’ Encyclopedia of ARTISTS of THE AMERICAN WEST, Peggy and Harold Samuels, 1985, Castle Publishing